Professor Ben O'Loughlin - Director
Ben O’Loughlin is Professor of International Relations and Co-Director of the New Political Communication Unit at Royal Holloway, University of London. He was Specialist Advisor to the House of Lords Committee on Soft Power and the UK's Influence. He is co-editor of the Sage journal Media, War and Conflict. In December 2013 Routledge in New York released the monograph: Strategic Narratives: Communication Power and the New World Order. Ben has since advised governments, international organisations and news media about how narrative works in global politics. In 2019 he was annual Thinker in Residence at the Royal Society, Brussels, writing a report Democracy and Disinformation. He is researching across the fields of AI, world order, and power.
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Professor Joost van Spanje
As a Professor of Political Science, Joost leads a research team that investigates if and how the news media cover new parties, and electoral effects of such coverage in 19 countries since 1950. For the project, see www.newnewsproject.com.
Joost has published about 50 SSCI-ranked journal articles, and two books. In the first book, entitled Controlling the Electoral Marketplace, he argues, and shows empirically, that particular established parties’ tactics cost challenger parties votes, on average, in 15 countries since 1944. The second (co-authored) book, called Prosecuting Politicians for Hate Speech and the Consequences for Democracy, describes 51 hate speech cases against 42 politicians in 9 countries since 1965 and demonstrates empirically that these trials backfire in 3 ways.
Joost previously conducted research at the EUI (Florence), Waseda (Tokyo), Oxford, and New York University. Invited talks he has given include lectures at WZB, Oxford, Waseda, and Stanford. In recent years Joost has won individual research grants adding up to awards of over €3,000,000. In addition, his students nominated him for the 2017 and 2020 University of Amsterdam Lecturer of the Year Awards. Joost's media experience includes interviews given to various international and national news media in North and South America, Australia, and Europe.
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Dr James Sloam
James Sloam is Reader in Politics and International Relations. His research interests are: political parties, the role of new media in young people's democratic engagement, German politics, European social democracy. He is the coordinator of the Youth Politics Unit at Royal Holloway.
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Dr Andreu Casas
Andreu is an Assistant Professor in Political Communication. He is also a Faculty Associate in the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University (NYU). He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Washington. Before joining Royal Holloway, Andreu was an assistant professor at VU Amsterdam, and a Moore Sloan Research Fellow at NYU, and a research fellow at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research.
He is a computational political scientist working on political communication, public policy, legislative politics, and computational methods. The substantive goal of his research is to build a better understanding of the policymaking process, broadly speaking, in the current digital society.
Andreu’s research in political communication and public policy looks at how social media has shaped collective action dynamics; how social movements, interest groups, political parties and the public use public communications to influence the political agenda; the role of (social) media in increasing/ameliorating polarization; and the regulation of political speech by social media companies. His research on legislative politics looks at the conditions under which individual legislators and legislative groups influence policy through less prominent (e.g. amendments) and more informal (e.g. bundling legislation) mechanisms. In addition, in all his research he develops and applies novel computation methods (text-as-data / images-as-data).
Dr Yoav Galai
Yoav Galai joined Royal Holloway as Lecturer in Global Political Communication in 2018. Formerly a photojournalist, now an academic researching narrative politics, visual politics and collective memory. His editorial writing mostly appears in The Conversation and his academic writing was published in International Political Sociology, Memory Studies and Security Dialogue.
Dr Akil N. Awan
Akil N. Awan is Senior Lecturer in Modern History, Political Violence and Terrorism at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is based in the Department of History. His research interests are focused around the history of terrorism, radicalization, social movements, protest, and new media. He has written widely in these areas, both academically and in the popular press. Dr Awan is also regularly consulted by government bodies, think-tanks, media and other organizations in his fields of expertise, and has served in an advisory capacity to the UK Home Office, the Foreign Office, the US State department, the US Military, Council of Europe, and the OSCE amongst others. Most recently, he served as special advisor on Radicalization to the UK Parliament; as academic expert on Genocide to the UK House of Lords delegation to Srebrenica; and as expert advisor on Youth Radicalisation to the United Nations. He is Founder and Chair of the UK Political Studies Association’s Specialist Group on Political Violence & Terrorism. His books include Radicalisation and Media: Terrorism and Connectivity in the New Media Ecology (Routledge, 2011), and Jihadism Transformed: al-Qaeda and Islamic State’s Global Battle of Ideas (Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2016).
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